How many of these devices would you have to buy and throw away to match the environmental material footprint of even one 1U rack-mount server? They're tiny. Orders of magnitude matter.
(Similar effect: However "disposable" USB flash drives may superficially seem, compared to the floppies they replaced they are nothing. And I do not just mean that the USB sticks can hold lots of stuff... I mean that if you pile a normal computer user of the 2015 era's USB sticks in one pile, and a normal computer user of the 1990 era's floppy disks into another pile, the floppies would tower over the entire pile of USB drives and almost certainly have a much larger environmental footprint. I hedge only for the possibility that the nasty flash memory might dominate the floppies manufacturing, but the floppies do irreducibly have an awful lot more plastic in them, so I'm still guessing the floppy pile comfortably "wins".)
Also, how much power would be lost by all those cheap bricks compared to a single, efficient switching power supply?
It also would be 65 systems to maintain.
Renting a fraction (via cloud/VPS) of a green server (good PUE DCs and LP gear) is far cheaper and greener. But more importantly, waste fewer computing resources.
Also, since you're piling on every possible thing you can to make your case, you should also include the power systems of every networking device between your cloud VM and you.
Not sure, but I think the point was that its "greener" because you can swap out individual parts over time using the same case and ultimately producing less waste. You may also argue that individual components are easier to recycle.
If form factors don't change, reusing the mounting hw, PSUs and enclosures can be doable. Some web shops wait until boxes die entirely before replacement while IT shops lifecycle out all gear (usually everything but racks) in 4-6 years.
These hotdog USB sticks aren't upgradable at all and they're limited to the processing power of 5-10W.